(NaturalNews) The U.S. government made an interesting announcement this week, admitting it purposely infected hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhea and syphilis back in the 1940s as part of an "inoculation study". Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius jointly made a public apology for the experiment, which they dubbed "unethical" and "abhorrent".

According to reports uncovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, U.S. government medical researchers secretly infected institutionalized mental patients in Guatemala with the STDs, without their knowledge. They then prompted those patients to spread the disease around to others as part of their study.

"We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices," said Clinton and Sebelius in a statement. However, according to a recent MSNBC report, the Guatemalan government was in on the experiment as well.

Similar covert research has been conducted here in the U.S. as well, including the 1932 Tuskegee experiment where U.S. researchers tricked hundreds of African-American men into thinking they were being treated for a "bad blood" disease -- which was really syphilis -- when in fact they gave them no treatment at all. That heinous experiment was not revealed publicly until 40 years later.

Of course, these are hardly isolated instances. There is mounting evidence against the U.S. government for regularly conducting medical experimentation on people, whether it be through forcing untested vaccinations on soldiers or drugging masses of children with psychiatric medications.

"In the 1950s, the U.S. government experimented on unwitting people by giving them the powerful hallucinogenic drug, LSD," explains Peter Breggin in his book Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications. "At least one of the experimental subjects, army officer Eric Olson, committed suicide by leaping out the window of an office building in which he was confined for the experiment. Eric didn't know he was the subject of an experiment and therefore had no idea that he was being driven mad by a drug."